Field of the Invention
This application relates generally to apparatus and methods for detecting and measuring analytes of interest by inducing electrochemiluminescence (ECL) in a test sample and detecting the resulting light.
Numerous methods and systems have been developed for detecting and quantitating analytes of interest in chemical, biochemical, biological, and environmental samples. Methods and systems that are capable of measuring toxins, environmental contaminants, pharmacological agents, bioactive substances, metabolites, pathogenic organisms, proteins and nucleic acids are of substantial value to researchers and clinicians. At this time, there are a number of commercially available instruments that utilize ECL for analytical measurements. These instruments have demonstrated exceptional performance.
The high cost, complex engineering and long development time required to custom-design and manufacture ECL instruments have delayed broad implementation of ECL technology. Clearly, there remains a need for ECL subsystems or modules that can be easily adapted to a broad variety of different applications.
Current needs for precision analytical testing instrumentation are extraordinarily diverse. For example, pharmaceutical screening analyses require instruments that can perform large numbers of analyses at very high speeds on very small quantities of sample. In addition, such instruments may need to perform many different types of highly sensitive quantitative tests utilizing different detection methods. Similarly, clinical diagnostic analyses for human health care typically require highly sensitive and exceptionally reliable instrumentation. In contrast, it is expected that commercial instruments intended for field use would be small, perhaps portable, simple to use, and operable with only limited power. Low production and maintenance costs are often predominant considerations.